Before I could put a single question to
Boris Johnson, he launched into an ebullient account of the political
situation: “We are now neck and neck with Labour with 18 months to go. The
economy turning round. Ship off the rocks.”

The Mayor of London’s favourite new
metaphor is the Costa Concordia. It
possesses the Johnsonian characteristics of being dramatic, popular, original,
amusing and in questionable taste. A more pedantic objection occurred to me: “It’s a
powerful image but the ship isn’t actually moving.”

Johnson admitted that when the new
metaphor was launched by him in a speech to the Institute of Directors, it attracted
a certain amount of criticism: “My Costa Concordia point didn’t go down
well with everyone.”

But he was not prepared to abandon the
image just because a few rather touchy people claimed to be offended. That if
anything made the metaphor more attractive to him.

Half-way through the interview, while explaining
how to get people to vote Conservative, he reverted to it: “I think in the end,
I think my Costa Concordia point was good. They [the voters] will not want to
have the same people back on the bridge who ran the boat aground.”

To liken the Labour leadership to an Italian captain who steered onto the the rocks, abandoned ship and left 32 of his passengers
to perish is unkind. But Johnson is clearly itching to tell the British people that
to put Labour back in charge would be madness.

ConHome: “What do you hope Lynton Crosby
[the Tories’ election strategist] will be asking you to do in the 2015
campaign?”

Johnson [in mock American accent]: “I will
be privileged to serve...in any capacity. [reverting to an English accent] The
fact is, genuinely, I do not want another Labour government while I’m mayor or
indeed for the forseeable future, I think they would take us in completely the
wrong direction… It’s the pointless negativity that I dislike about Labour.
That was where I think Ken Livingstone went wrong. He was always trying to
divide and beat up on some group or other. I never liked that.”

ConHome: “Is there any point in any Tory
association asking you if you’re interested in standing in 2015?”

Johnson: “My job is to serve the people of
London, and to defeat Balls and Miliband at the next election.”

Johnson: “My line on school food is,
everyone in the office says I’m completely crazy about this, but what I would
love is a return to the blissful days which I remember from Primrose Hill
Primary School when everyone ate together and it was jolly nutritious and that
was it….What Michael Gove is trying to do is absolutely fantastic and he’s
brilliantly supported by this operation that Henry Dimbleby is leading…the
Gover is finally grappling with this subject and he’s doing brilliantly.”

For ease of reference, I have grouped the
rest of Johnson’s remarks under the following headings: UKIP, Tax cuts,
Plebgate, the Tories and human nature, London and inequality, London and the housing crisis.

UKIP

ConHome: “Do you go along with the idea
that UKIP are the lost Tory tribe?”

Johnson: “Well I think a lot of UKIP
members probably are like that actually. A lot of UKIP members are Tories who
feel that the party no longer speaks for them, or to them, I think that
probably is true, but the point to make to them is well look, you know, I
certainly understand how you feel about the EU and so on, but in the end, the
logic of voting for UKIP is that you will bring Ed Miliband and Ed Balls into
government, and they won’t even offer a referendum, and I don’t see where that
gets us.”

ConHome: “Nigel Farage, born on 3 April
1964, is only a couple of months older than you, born on 19 June 1964, and he is
one of the select band of British politicians who actually cheer people up.”

Johnson: “Yes, I like Farage. I got a very
nice letter from his wife, inviting me to give a speech to introduce their
party conference.”

ConHome: “You declined the honour?”

Johnson: “I told them I thought Ukip could
rub along without me.”

Tax cuts

ConHome: “Do you think tax cuts should be
part of the Tory programme next time round?”

Johnson: “I think it is very difficult at
the moment and I understand why George is hesitant about this. But it is still
the case that our tax rates, our personal tax rates are still higher than
Germany or France or Italy. I think if you include other indirect taxes UK tax
is starting to come down a bit by European comparisons and that’s a healthy
thing. You’ve got to be tax competitive. But it is difficult, there is no
question at a time when real incomes have been falling, when people have really
been feeling the squeeze, when cost of living has been going up, it’s very hard
to see deep tax cuts, that is politically a tough sell, all I’m saying is that
a great city like London can’t always be behind other jurisdictions.”

ConHome: “Reducing the top rate of tax from 50 to
45 per cent did cause an awful lot of political trouble, and it seems a pity
they didn’t go to 40 per cent.”

Johnson: “Yuh, why not, I mean I agree, I
agree, and I think a lot of people would agree with you.”

ConHome: “But they can’t do it now?”

Johnson: “I would [do it now], but you’d
have to look at the Treasury’s curves which predict how much they will take at
any tax rate. I think we should bring ourselves in line with our major
competitors.”

Plebgate

ConHome asked the Mayor if he agrees with
the many eminent people who
have complained that Operation Alice, the Metropolitan Police’s
investigation into Andrew Mitchell’s altercation with police officers at the
Downing Street gates, is taking far too long.

Johnson: “This is a very serious point and
obviously I have no operational jurisdiction. But what I can tell you is that
this is a decision for the CPS, and I think that a lot of the comment and the
criticism is a little bit mis-targeted and off target at the moment, because
the CPS have to make up their minds about what exactly to do. They have as I
understand it a huge amount of evidence, but I think the problem is they are
still receiving fresh evidence and fresh testimony of a kind that could not
have been expected, and that is my understanding of what is holding things up,
and I know people are impatient…I think to blame the Met is just a little bit
unfair. It’s between the CPS and the Met and collectively they’ve got to sort
it out as fast as possible.”

The Tories and human nature

Johnson: “In the end human nature responds
better to being given opportunities to better themselves than to opportunities
to bash other people and to try to pull other people down. That’s what Toryism
should be about, it should be about giving people opportunity and giving people
hope. Tories have won in the past hugely when we’ve built enough homes for
hard-working and aspiring people. The massive success of Macmillan, the massive
success in the 1930s, those were the great days when the Conservatives won huge
majorities, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do the same again. And we
should also be the party that champions employment, and the best answer to
poverty and inequality in London, which is unquestionably severe, is to get
people apprenticeships and then into work, that should be the Tory recipe for
success.

Inequality in London

“It is legitimate for Tories to worry about
inequality. It is not irrelevant to human nature. We cannot fail to notice what
is going on in the world around us, and if some people seem to be stupendously
rich but not in any way connected to the society they’re living in, and not
contributing to it in any obvious way, then that would be a cause for
resentment, so it is very very important that those who have done well and
those who are rich, that they do contribute, that they do reach out, they
should be, this goes particularly for the banks, who haven’t really paid a big
price for what happened in 2008, you know, they’ve got to be more engaged, and
a lot of them are trying very hard, as we’ve seen.

“My
answer to inequality is not to try endlessly to level down, it’s not a new
concept, I’ve always thought that is very difficult to achieve and very rarely
works. The answer is to smash down doors, to break down barriers, to let people
rise up. London is a fantastic engine, motor, whatever the metaphor you want,
it’s an amazing way of allowing people to do that. Because you have a great
deal of poverty and deprivation and so on, but you’ve also got, right next to
it, phenomenal opportunities, and my job, and a lot of the work we’ve been
doing over the last five years, has been to try to help people who, you know,
don’t, might not think of themselves as likely to get a job in banking or law
or whatever, to help them to bridge the gap, and that’s what the Mayor’s Fund
is there for and the apprenticeships. London is like a vast, what’s the word
I’m thinking of, cyclotron, it’s like a huge machine that accelerates talent,
and our job is to make sure that those who are missing out on the opportunities
are helped."

Housing in London

“The big pressures on people’s standard of
living include housing, huge cost, real problem, now I want to see people being able
to rent more cheaply in London, that’s of vital importance, we’ve got huge
numbers of people who’ve been priced further and further away from their place
of work…What you’ve got to do is build tens of thousands more homes every year.

“The difficulty is that prices are now six
or seven times earnings on average, and for low income earners prices are
something like nine times lowest quartile earnings. It is seriously difficult
for people on low incomes to live in central London. The biggest challenge now
is for government to grip this house-building thing by building thousands more
homes, and I know it always sounds worrying to people, they say what about the over-crowding. London was nine
million in 1911 and nine million in 1939, we’re only 8.2 million at the moment,
the city has traditionally shed huge numbers of people, we’re not shedding
them, we’re producing huge numbers of babies. We will have done 100,000 new
affordable homes by 2016. So that’s the big challenge. House price inflation as
we all know is not an unmixed good. There are loads of people who love the idea
that their property is going up and up in value, then there are far more people
who cannot get on the property ladder.”

As Johnson showed me out of his office, he asked his staff what they think of his Costa Concordia metaphor. None
of them looked enraptured. But I predict he will stick with it.

Comments

Before I could put a single question to
Boris Johnson, he launched into an ebullient account of the political
situation: “We are now neck and neck with Labour with 18 months to go. The
economy turning round. Ship off the rocks.”

The Mayor of London’s favourite new
metaphor is the Costa Concordia. It
possesses the Johnsonian characteristics of being dramatic, popular, original,
amusing and in questionable taste. A more pedantic objection occurred to me: “It’s a
powerful image but the ship isn’t actually moving.”

Johnson admitted that when the new
metaphor was launched by him in a speech to the Institute of Directors, it attracted
a certain amount of criticism: “My Costa Concordia point didn’t go down
well with everyone.”

But he was not prepared to abandon the
image just because a few rather touchy people claimed to be offended. That if
anything made the metaphor more attractive to him.

Half-way through the interview, while explaining
how to get people to vote Conservative, he reverted to it: “I think in the end,
I think my Costa Concordia point was good. They [the voters] will not want to
have the same people back on the bridge who ran the boat aground.”

To liken the Labour leadership to an Italian captain who steered onto the the rocks, abandoned ship and left 32 of his passengers
to perish is unkind. But Johnson is clearly itching to tell the British people that
to put Labour back in charge would be madness.